Alexander Rahr is director of the Russian/Eurasia Program at the German Council on Foreign Relations. Rahr’s views are considered so pro-Kremlin by some people that he has been called a KGB agent in the West. Rahr dismissed such labels this way to a Russian journalist for Argumenty Nedeli newspaper last year: “I am a grandson of emigrants from Russia who understands the two cultures and both worlds.”
Before joining the German council in 1994, Rahr was a senior analyst at the Research Institute of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Munich and project manager at the Federal Institute for East European and International Studies in Cologne. He has worked as a consultant for the Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, and is member of the executive board of Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy (YES).
Kyiv Post: You are a member of the board of the Yalta European Strategy and you were present at the recent annual meeting in Yalta. How was President Viktor Yanukovych’s position taken by the Western leaders there?
Alexander Rahr: Yanukovych came across as being very self-assured. It looks like he knows what he wants; he doesn’t want to listen to the criticism and doesn’t care about it. He feels that he has things under control; he is above the parliament and the oligarchs. He seemed very pragmatic.
If now he believes that for the economic well-being of Ukraine, it’s more important to work with Russia, he will go this way. If he understands that Russia can’t offer Ukraine anything, he will turn fully to the West. And he keeps both options open. From the West he looks for clear incentives and clear plan. He doesn’t want to get into discussions with the West about the Western values. He wants the results today. It was surprising to see that the highest representatives of the International Monetary Fund think that Ukraine is actually moving economically in the right direction and it will succeed with the reforms.
Yanukovych is very different from his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, who appealed to morals, to Ukrainian identity, to the country’s historical uniqueness between the Western and the Eastern Europe. All these are gone from his agenda.
Yanukovych sees Ukraine as a stable bridge from the East to the West which is a connection for goods, but not for ideas or culture.
KP: You have worked with many Russian Kremlin leaders. What are their plans for Ukraine? How do you evaluate the relations between Russia and Ukraine?
AR: Yanukovych appears pro-Russian. But there haven’t been any indications yet that Ukraine will integrate into Russia – neither in the customs union nor in the single economic space. Russians are now using the good relations as the opportunities to return back with their private firms to Ukraine. While the West is waiting, Russian capital is taking advantage of the new situation.
But there will be hard talks about [natural] gas between the two. Ukraine has its own stakes in this business; Yanukovych is willing to offer to Gazprom some assets in the pipeline system, but only on the condition that South Stream [a natural gas transit pipeline that bypasses Ukranie] will not be built and Ukraine continues to be the main transit route for Russian and Central Asian gas to Europe.
If Ukraine sees that Russian plans to circumvent its territory materialize, the relations may become worse.
There is a third side in this gas negotiations – the West. And so far I haven’t seen any moves by the Western companies to jump into the new situation and declare its willingness to modernize the Ukrainian gas transit sector. This is very surprising for me.
When Yushchenko and Tymoshenko went to Brussels in April 2009, the Western partners supported the idea of consortium between Ukraine and the West – even without Gazprom. Even the Nabucco project [another natural gas pipeline that bypasses Ukraine] was forgotten.
Now there is a possibility to have a trilateral consortium of Russia, Ukraine and the Western companies, but the West is not interested.
The European Union is firmly oriented towards Nabucco, which, in my opinion, is a myth, because it has no gas. Iraq may offer some gas to Turkey, but that’s all. Azerbaijan sells its gas to Russia. Iranian gas will never come to this pipeline. Turkmenistan has a problem of circumventing Iran on the way to Azerbaijan.
But people in the West see Nabucco as a strategic project on common security that may unite Europe with the Central Asia and will bring Turkey closer to the European Union. But if Nabucco is built, Ukraine will be out of the big energy picture.
KP: What do you think of Ukraine’s rapid change from parliamentary to presidential republic? How do the Western countries see it?
AR: Some think that Yanukovych is building some sort of [Russian Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin’s power vertical and people are very critical of that. I think there is some logic in changing the constitution back to [the] 1996 [version]. Ukraine has unfortunately proved that it’s not prepared to act as a parliamentary republic. I believe any other Ukrainian president would have done the same.
The question is how is it being done and whether the move to do it through the Constitutional Court was legitimate. Yanukovych should have asked parliament to make it legitimate. It would have looked better. But it principle, I think Ukraine needs presidential parliamentary system, with a president who executes power and the parliament that controls him.
Western leaders would have been much more critical of this change if they didn’t see the problem for five years when the president and prime minister were fighting each other while both were seen as pro-Western democrats.
KP: Germany is seen in Ukraine as one of the countries that halted Ukraine from integration into NATO and one of the countries that doesn’t want Ukraine to be a part of the European Union. How true is it? Does the reason lie in the close relationship between Germany and Russia?
AR: Germany is thankful to Moscow for making reunification of Germany possible in a peaceful way. For the last 20 years, Germany’s policy was bi-fold. On one hand, it supported the expansion of NATO and the expansion of the European Union, but at the same time, it was thinking how to accommodate Russia in the new European architecture.
In a couple of days, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angel Merkel and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will meet in France to make a sensational decision on much closer cooperation on European security affairs.
The fact that these two leaders want to cooperate with Russia shows that they want to accommodate Russia. Some other European countries still think of Russia in terms of the Cold War, and this is a problem inside of Europe.
Germany thought that it was too premature to bring Ukraine into NATO, without finding ways to make Russia secure. So Germany tries to understand the Russian position more than, for example, Poland. Germany wants to maximize the victory in the Cold War while France wants some sort of rapprochement with Russia also. So thinking that Germany acts this way because it is dependent on Russian gas is oversimplification. It’s more about far-sighted policy.
Concerning the visas, I don’t understand why Germans are not open on the visa policies with Ukraine. Merkel should have kept to the promise of predecessor Gerhard Schroder, who openly proclaimed at a meeting with [ex-Ukrainian President Leonid] Kuchma that Ukraine should get a special associative status for the European Union. It wouldn’t be a promise of membership, but it will set a path for Ukraine. It would not be directed against Russia, it would not split Ukraine like the NATO issue, but it would show that the West is willing to think about Ukraine as not only a strategic partner, but also as a part of Europe and unfortunately that has not been done.
Kyiv Post staff writer Kateryna Grushenko can be reached at [email protected]
